


But Who Will Ever Know?

by NervousAsexual



Category: Wild Wild West (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e27 The Night of the Murderous Spring, Gen, I love that episode, Yuletide Treat, and i love artemus, and i love dr. loveless, and oh my god do i love kitten twitty, roughly a quarter of this is me waxing nostalgic over the years i spent playing cello, thank you for requesting this requester because it reminded me just how much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27508489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: There were things Artie missed from the stage, but there were things he loved about the Secret Service.
Relationships: Artemus Gordon & James West
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	But Who Will Ever Know?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thestarsapart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsapart/gifts).



One of the things he missed most about the stage was the music. The minutes before a show began, huddled in the dark with a handful of other musicians. All the inevitable problems that popped up like crocuses in the snow--a cellist tuning low C just before the string broke with that sad glissando as it fell flat; a trumpeter fresh from a bar brawl holding chunks of ice to his face, hoping to bring down the swelling in his lips enough to use his mouthpiece; a clarinetist accidentally shredding reed after reed; any of the seemingly infinite crises that struck percussionists. The moment before the first downbeat, where everybody breathed as one. The moment after the final note, frozen in time and grinning at each other as the sound echoed into silence.

From time to time he still took down his violin. He played from a handful of the solo sheet music he still had or from memory of songs heard in the wild, in saloons or around campfires. It was never as fun to play alone.

He always told Jim that he should pick up an instrument--viola, maybe; Jim struck him as a strings kind of man. But of course that was far, far outside Jim's wheelhouse.

He understood. It was their differences that made them such good partners. Jim could climb hand over hand across snake pits, and Artemus could tinker for hours and turn the most idle, sarcastic remark into a functioning gadget. Jim could seduce information out of a barn door, if necessary, and Artemus could vanish into any crowd, anywhere. The two of them worked together like clockwork.

Oh, from time to time it got a little stale--sometimes when the case was over and the night set in and the old war wounds were acting up he would have liked very much to fall into bed without a second thought but three times out of ten he found James enjoying the evening with some beautiful young thing who had already tried to kill him once--but for the most part he enjoyed the roles they played. He liked his time spent alone, tinkering with this gadget or that, trying out new songs or practicing old ones on the violin. Enjoying a book.

Well, maybe not enjoying a book as much as flipping idly through a book while Jim worked his wiles on his newest lady-friend in the next room, and that he liked less than the others, but it filled the evenings.

Another thing he missed about the stage: the smells. Greasepaint and musty costumes, oil lamps, wet paint. The sounds--oh, the sound of every instrument in the place converging on an open-A, the rushed scales, even thinking about it got to him every time, right there in that hole in his chest he kept stopped up with nostalgia. How many years had it been? Too many, he thought some days. Why had he ever left?

He told himself it was the challenge. The stakes were higher. If he was unconvincing as a confederate deserter on stage, the worst he might get was heckling, but if he was an unconvincing elderly prospector chatting up a gang of bank robbers he might well get a bullet to the head.

One more thing he missed about the stage, something he rarely admitted to himself: he missed the credit.

If he disappeared into a role on the stage he got to come back out for final bows and there was a pleasant thrill to knowing that not only had he fooled them into thinking he was someone else but they knew they'd been fooled. And they enjoyed it! Came back for more! Every time a new show opened he recognized somebody in the crowd outside the theater.

Whether he was on or below the stage or in the middle of the western desert he didn't do anything for credit. He wasn't one of those performers who needed constant reassurance; he was good at what he did and he knew it. All the same it would have been nice to play a more active role in things. Take that hospital where Dr. Loveless had kidnapped Jim off to, drugged silly. That was his chance to ride to the rescue and he savored it, even if it did end in his getting the stuffing beaten out of him by what had appeared to be a gang of the infirm.

When he finally admitted to himself that yes, it was probably in his best interest to stop fighting and just get on with it Loveless' new assistant, Kitten Twitty (oh, how much amusement he got from that name; the consonance of it made him absurdly happy), rolled the little maniac over in a wheelchair. His first thought was one of concern--what had Loveless done this time that he couldn't even walk? He was able to laugh at himself over that. How many times had this man tried to murder him, and yet he instinctively worried for his safety. His second thought was that maybe he would have been better served dressing as a nurse and slipping in the back way.

Feeling foolish, he let Loveless and company lead him up to the room where Jim was and didn't even complain when they shoved him inside so hard he bit dust on the bed immediately inside the door. He got to his feet and turned, hoping for an opening of some kind, and instead he saw the door closing behind him and Jim sprawled ungracefully in a chair.

He was glad to see Jim, but Jim seemed infinitely more glad to see him. "Is it really you?" he asked, which seemed a silly thing to ask when Jim knew him so well that he was the one person in the world who could reliably see through his disguises. But then he opened Artie's jacket and looked him over with this look of unbelievable awe in his eyes, and he said in the most amazed voice, "But I thought I shot you."

"You've done your share," he told him, "but I don't think you got around to shooting me yet." It all made more sense when Jim explained about the water-borne drug Loveless had slipped him, the one that made him see things that weren't there, hurt people he hadn't touched--the one that made Jim shoot what he thought was Artie in a rage that turned very quickly to despair. Yet he hardly paid any attention to that. He was distracted by that tone of voice--a little bit of grief, a lot of sadness, and all amazement, all at the prospect of losing Artemus forever only to gain him back. "But I thought I shot you." After making a jackass of himself in front of Loveless and company, it was gratifying to hear even tangentially how important he was to Jim.

It was easy to forget from time to time. He would look over his reports before finalizing them and look with not a little chagrin at the discrepancies between his actions and Jim's--between ten-thirty and ten-forty on such and such a day Jim entered a bar, fought off assassins, and acquired information about the local gang; during the same period Artemus squinted at himself in the mirror on the train, trying to decide if his false beard looked too false. It probably sounded silly to whatever bureaucrat's secretary read the report, but sometimes a last-minute adjustment was the difference between weaseling himself into a source of information and weaseling himself and Jim both into an early grave.

He missed the music, the smells, the ovations from the stage, but he had found new things he would miss if he lost them. In an orchestra pit he was proud when he got a good tone from a particularly difficult harmonic or for two hours convinced the world he was someone else entirely. In the train car he was proud to toss Jim his latest in explosive cigars or hidden weapons or chemical compounds that could hold a man's weight for ten seconds after application. Credit or no credit, he was doing incredible work.

Jim once told him of a warlord he'd killed. With his dying breath the man told him, "You're a hero, but who will ever know?" Jim had just looked at the man and asked, "What's it matter?"

What did it matter? He knew. Jim knew. They both knew and they were both proud of what they did, and in the end that was the thing that really mattered.


End file.
